No time for utopia

Though mired in the beginnings of the Great Depression, one of the most optimistic documents of the 20th century was published on May 1, 1933. The Humanist Manifesto proclaimed a new religious movement that would transcend the fragmented religions of the world.

Written mostly by a Unitarian minister, Raymond Bragg, the manifesto proposed:

“The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. … Religions the world over are under the necessity of coming to terms with new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and experience. In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism.”

The world did not embrace a vision of coming together, and the humanist movement, too, evolved into a more negative view.

An evolution of religion

Roger Scruton, who grew up with parents who avowed humanism, but embraced traditional religion after graduating, observed in an American Spectator essay:

“Humanists of the old school were not believers. The ability to question, to doubt, to live in perpetual uncertainty, they thought, is one of the noble endowments of the human intellect. But they respected religion and studied it for the moral and spiritual truths that could outlive the God who once promoted them.”

The authors of the first manifesto, there have been two updates, 1973 and 2003, sought to reconcile faith, the diversity of religion, and the expanding understanding scientific inquiry was discovering about our biology, our planet and our universe.

“Nothing human is alien to the religious.” The sixth “affirmation,” as the authors called the tenets of the manifesto, declared. “It includes labor, art, science, philosophy, love, friendship, recreation – all that is in its degree expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.”

Naïve or prescient?

The pan-religious views of the humanists on one hand seem naïve – religious conflict, or conflict that uses religious difference as a lever, is rampant, and makes it appear impossible to have dialogue, much less peaceful reconciliation – and on the other hand seem prescient – while religion remains of key importance to over 80 percent of Americans, their definition of religion has become increasingly fluid and diffuse.

In 1973, the manifesto was updated by Paul Kurtz and Edwin Wilson and signed by a number of global thought leaders.

The Human Manifesto II began by saying the first manifesto was “far too optimistic. Nazism has shown the depths of brutality of which humanity is capable. Science has sometimes brought evil as well as good. Recent decades have shown that inhuman wars can be made in the name of peace.”

But the 1973 and the 2003 manifestos were explicit in their rejection of religion, and laid the ills of modernity in our stubborn insistence to cling to beliefs in the supernatural.

Seventy years of watching the world not embrace their vision and become more entrenched in dogmatic difference seemed to rub off on the humanists as well. We all want to blame something or somebody for our failures.

The original manifesto’s optimistic vision of an inclusive humanness seems quaint in today’s more “sophisticated” world.

As Scruton wrote, “I never thought, when I finally put the old humanism behind me, that I would ever feel nostalgia over its loss. But now I recognize that it was not only noble in itself, but was also a serious attempt to retain the belief in nobility without the theological vision on which that belief had once depended. It was, in effect, a proof of the ideal that it proposed: an example of how human beings can provide themselves with values, and then live up to them.”